Leading questions:
Representative vs Direct Democracy?
Unitary or Federal?
Presidential or Parliamentary?
How much separations of powers should there be? In presidential systems, such as the United States of America, there is often deadlock between the executive and legislature. In parliamentary systems, the head of government is elected by legislature, therefore, there is practically no deadlock as long as theres is majority support of the executive in the legislature (although, there can still be courts to determine constitutionality of policiss). Would you prefer more checks and balances, but can also result in more deadlock, or a government more easily able to enact policies, for better or for worse?
Electoral method? FPTP? Two-Round? Ranked-Choice/Single-Transferable Vote? What about legislature? Should there be local districts? Single or Multi member districts? Proportional-representation based on votes for a party? If so, how should the party-lists be determined?
Should anti-democratic parties be banned? Or should all parties be allowed to compete in elections, regardless of ideology? In Germany, they practice what's called "Defensive Democracy" which bans any political parties (and their successors) that are anti-democratic. Some of banned political parties include the nazi party.
How easy or difficult should the constitution br allowed to be changed? Majority support or some type of supermajority support?
Should we really elect officials, or randomly select them via sortition?
These are just some topics to think about, you don't have to answer all of them.
Edit: Clarified some things
Representative parliamentary. If it’s a large country (both population and area) or geographically diverse country (eg an archipelago) it should be federal, if not unitary.
Proportional representation based on party lists. Getting on the ballot requires evidence of grassroots support. Silly example: you must have video evidence of you engaging with 5000 unique constituents in a 5 minute one-on-one conversation on the issues in the last year at their residence. The video must end with the constituent explicitly endorsing you. That means at least 5000 5 minute videos with 5000 unrelated people. That’s a lot of physical legwork were you must meet the people. There are better ways, this is just a simple example.
Choose a voting system that favours coalition building.
Elections should be publicly funded. Don’t ban political parties, do ban explicitly anti-democratic people. Antidemocratic ppl can’t work via proxies. They’re, justifiably, afraid that their proxy will steal the power for themselves.
Completely separate head of state (who should be powerless) and head of government. Lots of pomp, ceremonies, frequent press coverage of the powerless head of state. Let the portion of politics that is effectively a dog and pony show focus on him. Let people get emotionally swept up about him wearing a tan suit or sleeping with his secretary or get super proud about how totally not old he is. The head of state can be a show. The head of government should be a boring bureaucrat.
There’s more, but this seems a decent start.
I'd like this idea, and would like to expand democracy to the work place. Leader's at work should be elected by the workers, not the board of directors.
Napoléon III would like to teach you a lesson regarding anti-democratic people and proxies. Hitler may add some notes too regarding how to do politics from prison.
I’m genuinely interested how Napoleon 3 used proxies.
My thinking is something the lines of:
In democracies, demagogues don’t get truly dangerous until they gain some form of state power. They used that little bit of state power to both fund their allies (state capture for capitalists, government hand outs for the people) and undermine their enemies (breaking down/stymieing democratic institutions)
Eventually, they accrue enough state power to take over the state, either internally (think putin, erdogan) or via an old fashion coup / fake crisis (hitler and erdogan again)
In my mind that real power is necessary to overthrow democracies. I have trouble finding good instances of demagogues putting themselves in a situation where their proxy has more real power than them.
I’d appreciate some examples that undermine that logic.
Note: I’m excluding cases of real popular revolt. I.e. you have more than 50% of population’s support.
That's what Napoléon 3 did: he was the proxy. From my memories, conservative (royalist I think) used Napoléon as a proxy to take the president seat because he was not well known, he was from napoleon family, and they thought he was an idiot they could easily manipulate or force to do their job. I don't remember the next part well, but Napoléon 3 played the game until he could make a coup to take the power for himself. Wikipedia should have the informations.
France third republic was a political mess. It was oscillating between democracy and monarchy. Napoleon obviously gathered population support, but it wasn't a revolution still, he merely took the power and forced the parliament to give him the power iirc, because the military would rather support him than monarchy.
Okay. That tracks. I remember him mumbling into the presidency and then just taking over.
So, my logic of proxies being a bad idea, because the proxy will double cross you, still holds. However, despite that, people are still dumb enough to push a proxy forward. And that proxy can turn out to be demagogue as well.
Fair critique.